How prayer can help after a school shooting

By Kay Campbell

In our case, the fatal shot came during the chaotic last week of school. The all-school lock-down alarm cracked the quiet of my classroom. We locked the door and sat quietly, remarking it was a strange time for a drill.

Saying a prayer didn’t occur to me. Then.

The kids chatted. I shifted papers. We waited for the assistant principal to come around. She never came. In those pre-Columbine days, within about 10 minutes we teachers stepped out of our classrooms to confer. One of our seniors – days away from graduating – had shot another in the culmination of a feud over a girl that had escalated all spring.

“It will be OK,” I assured my students, the murmur of a prayer sputtering wordlessly to life in my heart. “It’s harder to kill people in real life than it is on TV.”

Teachers often don’t know what they’re talking about.

Where was faith at that moment? Our high school has enough students of faith to sponsor a weekly early-morning devotional circle. Our graduations still feature a prayer delivered — in Jesus’ name — by one of the students. This is a school where the principal, finally, crackled the intercom into action and announced, with a broken voice, that we should join together in prayer. Which he led.

The separation of church and public school hasn’t percolated to my small, Southern town.

Personally, I’m from the liberal Presbyterian, female-ordaining, gay-marrying, interfaith-embracing, social activist side of the Christian family. But I do pray. That day, I remember, the prayer that formed itself in my mind was a kind of “O God, O God, O God” mantra.

Because: For what does one pray for in that instance? The recovery of the victim, certainly. The mother of the shooter, certainly, and the mother of the victim. The shooter, too. And all those within earshot of the violence. And for the Spirit to take up our prayer, as Romans 8:26 puts it, “with sighs and groans too deep for words.”

Can prayer help?

Yes. It does. But I don’t know how.

And that’s probably the point.

Logically, I know that only people change things – I believe God put us here to do the work of repairing and tending this world.

But, over the years, I’ve seen simple prayer work – really work. It opens a calm we can’t express or evoke with mere language. It screams louder than our rage. It administers a silent balm. It nudges open locked doors. It pours strength into fainting hearts.

I saw it then in 1998, when, the next day, students chose to gather in classrooms with volunteer pastors and social workers from the community to begin grieving the death of a football star and the arrest of an academic star.

My homeroom kids surrounded the youth minister assigned to my room. I was struck by how the kids who were part of a youth group at their church were equipped both to grieve and to support each other. When they circled up for prayer, they hung onto each other the way we humans naturally do when in crisis. They had vocabulary and ritual prepared for loss. They sensed a resonance in the universe with which to share their grief and air their anger.

None of that looks like anything other than primitivism to a religious outsider, I know.

But that’s because it’s a different way of knowing that cool reason apprehends, explains Karen Armstrong. In her “A Case for God,” Armstrong spends a lot of pages talking about the fact that “God,” whatever that is, can’t be talked about, only experienced.

In the days following our shooting, I saw God experienced in hugs, in tears, in silent squeezes of hands, in the half-mast flags all over our town, in the white-ribboned empty chair at the graduation ceremony, and in the other empty but undecorated chair.

In the stillness after the gunshots split the air, the Divine shimmered, offering no answers, no explanations, but emanating both eternal sorrow and eternal hope and joy.

So, from a long ways away, I do send my own prayers to Spokane – and continue my pragmatic support for better gun regulation and mental health treatments. Y’all hang on to each other!